I'm Not Asking
by HarvenHiddles
Summary: He must protect his closest friends from an elusive threat. Death paralyzes the city of London, and as the infection spreads, certain people realise how helpless they are while Sherlock is dead. Dr. Hannibal Lecter makes his motive clear and personal to the consulting-detective-in-hiding, delivering his disturbingly frightening ultimatum.
1. Dead Man's Prologue

**Did you take a look at the materials I sent you?**

**Hmm? Oh. Yes. Yes, I did.**

**You haven't even leafed through them, I can tell.**

**I read something about cats on the first page, I remember that.**

**You're coming along, that's good. Though I daresay not as gracefully as I hoped.**

**One can only deal with so much in a day.**

**So much what? Can you be more specific?**

**Frustration. So much of my own frustration.**

. . . *

I am looking over the water, my retrospective eye pulling this mind backwards, into another place, another time. I stretch out my arms and feel the heavy weight of wool yank them down in the creases of my coat. But I am weightless. I am feeling the sky stretching out before me, beside me, behind me where there is darkness and above where the light bears down on my head. I have no properties. I have no chains. I am free-

_Thank you-_

And I am falling.

_Liberty In Death!_

But, no.

I pull open my eyes, feeling the wet salt sting them mercilessly. I look down, see nothing but long drops of air and finally a tumultuous collision of water, hundreds of feet below. I step back from the ledge and shove my hands into my deep pockets and I turn around and go.

_Not today._

A car hums, waiting by the side of the pebbled road, the engine grinding softly against the gears, impatient and hungry for release. This must be my car.

How nice.

My boot gives the black Mercedes its gunning thrust forwards and at an almost catatonic pace, I resume driving, and the landscape means little to me. My mind is ahead of the car, racing at blinding speed towards a fatal collision with a star, somewhere, lingering, floating and humming, and with its eyes set on me it is coming fast. Or has it already come? Am I feeling aftershock only?

Numbness, fatigue-no, not fatigue-weariness takes over my body at a constant pace even though my mind struggles to fight the sleep. Morpheus' web has snared my physical form, trapped my limbs in a slow mire that destroys my tendons and crushes my bones from the inside out, from the red to the white and the white to the black I am starting off done. Through, and through, I am done. There is no motion that keeps me limber, no investigation that keeps me curious and wanting. There is no more work that I am allowed. There is no game for me to play.

And my brain is starting to rot away.

_Senseless, _I think, _absurdly senseless. _I begin to jerk my eyes from mirror to mirror to road, cautiously watching for men or horses or cats or cars, but speeding on along I know that I am alone on this bleak stretch of highway. In the green, twisting hills of the deep country my thin grey line is the only road cut into the earth, and the sky overhead rolls on and on, a great grey blanket of sad, which has started wringing out rain onto the roof of the car with soft _pings! _and _pangs! _and drops of steel draw my concentration away and shatter it in a thousand directions.

The Mercedes' windows roll back up and this helps clear away some of the sound, which has so torturously been pounding in my ears ever since the Problem began, and now it never goes away. I am forced to move myself out of the city on regular occasions, as often as every weekend or every few days, because I physically cannot stand to intake the sound of London anymore. Cars, calls, phones, and people and their dogs and houses and keys and _moving. _It drives me _insane, _but no matter how I react I need to do _the job, _and without _the job, _I am nothing, have nothing, live for nothing.

Conclusion: I cannot afford to be insane.

Shifting manual gears upwards, I fix my eyes on the grainy, bumpy road and as miles pass by me unnoticed, unceremonious, my eyes grow into boring round balls, staring, faceless. My vision starts to turn kaleidoscopic as the road bores me endlessly and onward, and I have nothing to distract me throughout the miles and miles of dreamy driving. Though of recent the pale brown fenceposts seem to fly by faster, and the distant pops of thunder upstairs have peeled away into scraps of nothing, having been left behind by my thundering black car.

I make an analogy comparing the black rover to a stout, hardy stallion trouncing through a difficult mire, who kicks his heels up indignantly at the first sign of a slipping foothold and cocks his mighty head up in the air, blowing white foam from his flared red nostrils, spewing spit out of his frothy mouth. Sweat like raindrops form and slip along his dark, wet skin, skin like a seal's body underwater, water like tears of skin that the body cries, cries out for release, for definition, for favours, for touching, needs, hands, _Joh...n-no._

No. No one must ever know.

I hold desperately onto the wheel, but underneath me the earth slides out of control.

*** NOTES ***

Didn't rate the work because I want to have an open mind about where I am going to take this story.

If any readers have suggestions, gimmegimmegimme because I can seriously handle the critique that may come along with it. In fact, I love the critique.

Remember that I could always improve something I'm missing if only I get a helpful dose of comments by readers!

Finally, I seriously hope that such a chilling tale will catch you all off guard and set your feels on fire, because this is what good fanfiction does to me. (Oh god, I'm becoming Moffat.)


	2. His First Chapter

**Why so soon?**

**I...saw you more than six days ago.**

**And...?**

**And? What?**

**And why today? Why now?**

**Because days are long. You have no idea how long mine are.**

**Long? Can you describe that?**

****. . . *

He set his cup of ginseng tea on the dark oaken table. Hands rubbed his temples, sighing, tiredly staring out of a window that was two stories above Baker Street.

John Watson's face was pale this morning. Stark pale. He hadn't noticed it until Mrs. Hudson went to check in on him in the morning because she'd heard him screaming the night before.

The teacup was shaking almost unnoticeably in his grasp as he picked it up again after a brief interlude, in which Watson stared unblinkingly at his laptop screen, which only stared back, except the LED monitor looked quite a bit brighter.

Light streaming in through the east-facing window illuminated the tiny pocks in his worn nose and forehead, remnants of freckles-that-once-were. Freckles, which were John's little badges of honour for his long and enduring years of service in the Army, reminders of the long hot hours spent in the sun with his company and friends. Of his gallant troop, the British army doctor had been one of the few-some would say, the lucky few-who had survived Maiwand.

When the officers had come to him looking for a professional account of the battle, and for names of the men who'd fought and died, John had stepped forward, quietly. He typed a two-page inscription which cleverly but succinctly detailed every course of action that the Fifth had taken to ward off the enemy, and noted flawlessly that, of course, the Queen's men had rallied all the spirit they could, but the Afghan onslaught mobilized by Ayub Khan (Mohmand. Gov. Herat Province, Afghanistan) was just too great a force to overcome.

John's account had been brief, and chillingly distant. The army generals who would later skim over it with the same cold, hard, trained eyes would not begin to believe that the account had been scrawled out by one last, lonely survivor of a traumatizing experience. And John didn't want them to know. He only cared that his friends and family knew, and to hell with generals; they could go and read the fine print themselves.

After he'd returned to London, John had tried to get himself some sleep. Although, when he tried to sleep at night the memories came flooding over him in a torrent and always, _always _woke him up. The more tired he grew, the later he tried to sleep into the day, but the sound of London cars stirred him. So he paid for a therapist.

She managed to help him sleep. But not much else.

The daymares came frequent and made him livid, while the nighttime grew hauntingly dark, and full of terrors. He tried getting out, but he was never much good at that. People were too busy, not doing anything.

And he tried staying in, of course, but inactivity did John Watson no good. It made his fingers flinch and his hands twitch.

Weeks of little disturbances had driven him nearly up the wall of his little brown flat in the middle of London, but one afternoon would change all of that. On a Thursday, John _just happened _to go out, and he _just happened _to meet an old school friend of his in the park down by London Bridge Hospital, where John had been thinking of going in to interview for a day job.

As it turned out, it wasn't rest, or a therapist, or a job, that John needed.

It was a distraction.

And, moreover, an insight into a slice of London that he'd never seen before.

Sherlock's slice.

And Sherlock guarded over his end of heaven to absolutely no end, playing about when he wanted to but all the time, John knew he meant it. He _cared. _Sherlock just didn't show it.

He had sort of hoped that, after the work he'd done around Sherlock and after the time that they had shared flat together, he would've come to mean something to Sherlock, or to the job, at least. He had sort of hoped that it would be not only he who needed Sherlock, but Sherlock who needed him.

When he sat at his desk, he sometimes flashed back to a memory. The memory was like a swollen stinger that set itself into his flesh and never left; it was a part of the scab that never healed, and so John continued to bleed out.

_Drivers..they have to live with it..._

John nestled his cup quietly.

_Strawberry jam...all over the lines..._

He began to cradle his head in his hands, began to wonder...

What would today be like, if I wasn't alone? If I wasn't the only one sitting in the flat at 221B?

John pushed back his chair and grabbed his coat from the hook, for it was too nice outside to sit in.

But that wasn't the real reason, was it? It was the aluminum crutch. Sometimes he brought it, other days he forgot it. Today he'd forgotten it, lying up against the windowsill, and his shoulder stiffened with every step he took, though not as badly as some other days. He stuck his hands in his pockets and wondered what he'd do with himself, as he walked along Baker Street.

In what John had recently grown to consider normal circumstances, he would be out with Sherlock on a day like this, solving crimes and blogging about them later. Erratic though they were-Sherlock's moods-John had come to realize that they formed his schedule structure. Every move of his was prone to Sherlock's temperaments.

Without his detective, he was lost.

John stopped walking. He started to recognize the street, and it was one he'd walked along many a time before. He realized why he must have come here. The houses were business-fronts, with a little sign here or there dictating who or what was the service proffered inside. John stopped at the sign that read, "Dingham, Lee, Therapeutic services."

Before he knew what he was doing, there came the sound of a knock the glass-and-wood door and footsteps tapped towards him from the other side. The door opened, and his therapist peeked her head out.

She tipped her head to the side and looked him over. Disheveled, she saw, and clearly distracted, what with the way his eyes wandered all the far way from her face to the ground. "John, what are you doing here?"

John snapped back into life and frowned, "I...think I needed to talk to someone."

He suddenly felt very guilty and bowed his head. A therapist had her clients, and today, on a Monday, there were bound to be lots of people in...

"Listen," he stammered, "look, I'm sorry, and I didn't mean to barge in, but I'll go now," his voice trailed away. _Truth is, I don't remember how I got here in the first place. I must be delusional._

Miss Lee clucked her tongue and looked him over. Then she stepped aside and ushered him inside the house with her hands. "John, you look a bit of a mess. Come in. I'm sure I can spare a few minutes."

When he followed her in, he glanced back out at the street, seeing that it was oddly quiet, for a Monday; he then noted that the address of Miss Dingham's home told him he'd walked four miles from home, without clue or perception of any of the walk after Baker Street, and thus he began to worry. Seriously worry.


End file.
